That catchy music is the best part of this program^^. It is damn hard to produce such music when two basic frequency dividers with a few waveform choices designed for shoot-em-up-game-sound is all you have for that ^^... It is actually better than the music from Pitfall II. I can't believe this is playing flawless through all the "video" stages without an extra chip driving the audio registers asynchronously (like Pitfall II does). An I can't believe that all fits into the cartridge. It must made out of many different kernels. At least one for each stage. But it fits... oO ^^

You can play very short sound over a long one just by ignoring the start of the latter. I've got 4 virtual channels this way by managing sound priorities and keeping drums short. :)

And some people think that if you see a pixel, throw out your console nowadays. Don't

Because of 128 bytes of RAM.

@@one_step_sideways you can add ram in cartridge through bank switching

SoldierOfJudgement04 This is due to cost reducing in cpu which is cheap version of one 16 bits address bus...so it implies cheap and low rom to work. It is not about underestimating but cost...Today it is easy to overcome limitation through bank switching emulation or flashcart with this feature and more memory

​@@tonmaster189 Cost reduction is what really caused issues. The 6507 has less address space and no interrupts - which means that when the TIA is done rendering a line there's no way for the CPU to know and send the data for the next line. The TIA is incredibly capable, especially for the era in which it was released. Had the CPU *at least* had some real interrupts, programming for the system would have been fantastically easier to manage.

Is it pre-calculated? Or really zoomy rotey on the poor overloaded 6507?

Yeah that was very impressive!

it uses predefined sin/cos tables for these effects@@greenaum

Thanks! :)

Thank you! Cheers!

Yes, it does.

Well, look at the overdrive 2 demo for the Sega Genesis. People say the demo cripples emulators, but works fine on actual hardware.

I don't know if you're a programmer... If not, you'd be surprised at how shitty, inefficient, and incorrect most code is at just about every level. It's almost unfathomable even to developers. But when you see things like this, it puts it into perspective. Devs are told to make things "good enough to release." Dissenters are told they are wasting company time and to stop fetishizing. Then of course, your (and millions of others') identities get hacked and it's, "*gasp* how could this have happened!?!?" from both policy makers and massive corporations. Then you're given (expensive) options about what YOU can do to protect the data on these systems that you never really asked to use, as they give you platitudes about how careful they are with your data. And tomorrow the next dev asks if he can rework that module before release. Take a guess at what they tell him... So yes, it's likely the Atari 2600 is capable of running such code in real time. However antiquated it seems today, it was, in the end, a system designed specifically to display computer graphics. Kinda cool, huh? :)

Thanks! And yes - it's all running on pure 2600 with classic F4 (32k) bankswitching.

@@KKAltair Great! Doing more with less, the 6507 rather than an ARM more powerful than the Nintendo DS, is where the genius is! I know a lot of the tables are precomputed, but you could've done that on a C64 or a Vax or something! Good work, keep it up. The grey boxes particularly look good. Horizontal effects are cheaper than vertical ones on the 2600, so you're really playing to the machine's strengths. Same thing with the rainbow bars that've been Atari hallmarks since the beginning. Indeed on the Atari 8-bit computers rainbows are basically free. But the public love 'em, and why wouldn't they? Actually your grey boxes remind me a bit of the Atari official Robot Demo.

On top of that - it doesn't use ARM acceleration.

It's not entirely native A2600. The movement is beyond the pixels...

Careful timing and usual TIA stuff. :)

There was no screen RAM. You could use the TIA chip to draw whatever you like as the TV's electron bean scans across and down. You can actually create something really cool without even using any RAM.... just all code on the ROM manipulating the TIA registers. I'm not saying I know how THIS demo worked. :) Just saying what's possible in general....